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Sausage Stuffing
Mix one-half pound of sausage meat with an equal quantity of bread crumbs. Season with one tablespoon each of onion juice and minced parsley and a little salt and pepper.
A plain forcemeat of the period: bulk sausage cut with crumbs to stretch it and keep it from packing solid. The whole thing hinges on the sausage being raw when it goes in, so temperature at the end matters more than anything else.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a pound of sausage meat plus about the same quantity of crumbs. Read by volume that is roughly a cup of soft crumbs; read by weight, 8 oz. Enough for a small bird or a pan of stuffed vegetables; scale up for a larger one.
- "An equal quantity"The original is ambiguous: equal by weight gives a dense, meaty stuffing, equal by volume gives a lighter one. Either reading is defensible.
- Sausage meatThis means uncased bulk pork sausage, already salted and often sage-seasoned. If you buy links, slit the casings and discard them. Commercial sausage can be heavily salted, so hold back on the added salt until you taste.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far too much fat and turn pasty. Stale white sandwich bread pulsed briefly in a processor is the closest match.
- Onion juiceA standard flavouring of the era, made by halving an onion and pressing or grating it, then straining. A tablespoon of juice is roughly what a small grated onion yields; grated onion pulp works and adds a little more body.
- Do not pack itFill any cavity loosely. Sausage swells as it cooks and crumbs absorb juices, and a tightly packed cavity is what keeps the centre cold long past the point the bird itself looks done.
- Finishing temperatureThe pork goes in raw, so the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F on an instant-read thermometer, not just the thigh of the bird. If the bird is done first, scoop the stuffing into a dish and finish it in a 350F oven.
- Baked separatelyBaked in a buttered dish rather than in the bird, it needs about 30 to 40 minutes at 350F, covered for most of that time so it does not dry, then uncovered to brown.
Butterick published this book in 1911 as part of the same household empire that sold dress patterns and The Delineator. Sausage stuffing appears here in the shortest possible form because the book assumes the reader already knows how to fill and truss a fowl, with half a pound of seasoned pork doing the work of a great deal of separate spicing. The pairing of pork forcemeat with poultry is much older than the book and is customarily traced to English practice, where sage-heavy sausage meat is said to have been standard with goose and turkey; the use of onion juice rather than chopped onion is characteristically turn-of-the-century.